Google Analytics: adding search engines

I’ve been diving a bit in to Google Analytics lately, and one of the things you’ll notice when you run Google Analytics is that it doesn’t recognize every conceivable search engine straight out of the box. For instance, Ilse.nl, still quite popular here in the Netherlands, doesn’t seem to be seen as “organic” in Google Analytics.

Now it is possible, as the help shows quite clearly, to add extra search engines, by adding some lines of code inside the script tag like this:

Post author: Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk is the owner and creator of Yoast.com. He's a WordPress / Web developer, SEO & and an Open Source fanatic.
He's also (and more importantly) the father of three sons called Tycho, Ravi and Borre, a daughter called Wende and the husband of the lovely Marieke, who also works at Yoast. Read all about Joost »

26 Responses

I actually e-mailed with someone at Google about this some months ago. Google states that they only support twenty SE’s by default and you could add more if you like yourself.

Stupid thing is that what they say is not true: there are actually 27 search engines being supported, as you can see here: http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js
So if you follow the help-section and add for instance Ilse as “_uOsr[20]=”, you are actually deleting another default supported SE in the process.

Seems like Google added some SE’s in contrary to their own guideline and did not update the help section afterwards.

Best thing they could do in my opinion is just support EVERY search engine server-side by keeping this all out of the JavaScript and doing it internally when analysing the saved user data.

‘By default, Google Analytics tracks referrals from 20 search engines as listed in the urchin.js JavaScript file.
You can also configure Analytics to identify referrals from additional search engines by adding the following line to your tracking code:

The script built by GA Experts (and Joost’s modification) build whole new _uOsr and _uOkw arrays in such a way that any new added search engine will always be at the end of the array (and not replace an already declared search engine).

I’m not critizing GA-Experts or Joost, nor am I asking Google to change their way of recognizing search engine referers. The thing just is that what their help section is stating does not meet the contents of urchin.js and could cause a lot of confusion.

Another painful site that seems impossible to track is google base/google product search (formerly froogle). There’s no way to separate it from regular google traffic since it moved to google.com/products from froogle.google.com.

It looks like the _uOsr-values specify a key string that has to be found within the host name of the referer. In Google’s own list of search engines, they have a string ‘google’ (so not ‘google.com’ or like that). I think that every domain or subdomain that contains this specified string AND has the query variable set is considerred a search engine. This means all the localized google domains are recognized and images.google.* too.

In the GA Experts script there are no such things anymore as the default search engines that Google already recognizes, because the two arrays within the script that specify them are re-initalized (var _uOsr=new Array();) and afterwards filled again.
Since Google proves with it’s own configuration that it is able to detect ‘all’ google domains by just specifying the string ‘google’, I think there would be no real need for all the national domain extensions that are being added manually in the GA Experts script (for Google and Yahoo). You only would have to specify the string where you want Google to look at in the domain name just before the domain extension.

I personally stay away from Google Analytics as it can hurt rankings based on bounce times. There was an SEO firm that did some experiments and they were able to impact their SERPs. A cool new topic you might want to blog about is Googles new unavailable_after meta tag. This could be potentially a powerful tool for Webmasters, especially when you get stuck with stuff in the index you no longer want. Cheers.

By Richard Hearneon 22 July, 2007

Now what would be really nice would be to pick out things like ‘pages from [country]’ searches. I think that’s a stat that could be very useful.

@Vancouver Island Daryl: One of the main reasons for using an analytics-tool is to improve funnel conversions and reduce bounce rates, so my opinion is when you know how to use the data GA presents in your advantage, Google using the same data for their rankins doesn’t necessarily have to be a negative side-effect.

I also look forward to learn about the results of using the new meta-tag.